Bending Toward the Sun, a Memoir by Leslie Gilbert-Lurie with Rita Lurie is a powerful story about surviving the Holocaust and the complicated family bonds then created, crossing three generations.

Rita Lurie was five years old when she was forced to flee her home in Poland to hide from the Nazis. From the summer of 1942 to mid-1944, she and fourteen members of her family shared a nearly silent existence in a cramped, dark attic, subsisting on scraps of raw food. Young Rita watched helplessly as first her younger brother then her mother died before her eyes. Motherless and stateless, Rita and her surviving family spent the next five years wandering throughout Europe, waiting for a country to accept them. The tragedy of the Holocaust was only the beginning of Rita’s story.

Decades later, Rita is a mother herself, the matriarch of a close-knit family in California. Yet in addition to love, Rita unknowingly passes to her children feelings of fear, apprehension, and guilt. Her daughter Leslie, an accomplished lawyer, media executive, and philanthropist, began probing the traumatic events of her mother’s childhood to discover how Rita’s pain has affected not only Leslie’s life and outlook but also Leslie’s daughter’s, Mikaela’s. A decade-long collaboration between mother and daughter, Bending Toward the Sun reveals how deeply the Holocaust remains in the hearts and minds of survivors, influencing even the lives of their descendants. It also sheds light on the generational reach of any trauma, beyond the initial victim. Drawing on interviews with the other survivors and with the Polish family who hid five-year-old Rita, Leslie and Rita bring together the stories of three generations of women—mother, daughter, and granddaughter—to understand the legacy that unites, inspires, and haunts them all.

This memoir is written in three parts, first telling the incredibly heartbreaking experience of Holocaust survivor, Rite Lurie, then Rita’s daughter tells the story of how her mother’s life experiences have effected hers, and lastly Leslie, Rita, and Leslie’s daughter, Mikaela come together to write the ending of this powerful story, their legacy. While Rita’s early life has been full of devastation, as upsetting as this is to read, in the end this is an inspiring story of survival and generational family ties.

If you were previously uneducated about the Holocaust survivors who hid for years and years to evade concentration camps, here is a firsthand experience from the last generation of Holocaust survivors. Bending Toward the Sun will not only encourage readers to learn as much as they can about the Holocaust but it also provokes readers to look at their lives and research how their earlier generations have affected their lives in more ways than they realize.

This book clearly shows how the Holocaust survivors lives’ impact their future generations, mainly leaving a trail of fear of separation and let’s not forget the hope of overcoming what their earlier generations could not. This is a beautifully written mother/daughter Holocaust memoir that is simply put yet is an incredibly complex story, including family photos throughout from the 1930s to present day and even a family tree in the front of the book. This book is devastating and uplifting, and incredibly captivating as it is impossible to put down and impossible to pass on.